Seeing Hamlet when you’re pushing 50 is different than when you’re in your 20s or 30s, and not just because the whole damn play is arguably about mortality, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

You can tell that every scene in Nuance Theatre’s unabridged Hamlet, which is up for one more weekend through this Saturday, has been worked on and worked on, and I suppose that’s the point of this production: to cover all the “B” scenes that usually get cut by smaller company productions.

There are solid performances all over the place, though they miss one another at times. Since they bring differing styles they rarely seem like they’re reacting to what happened in the previous scene. Each one is rather a clean slate with a well-executed dramatic moment. Consequently the gears aren’t always engaged. If there’s any flaw in the show overall, it’s in the wider direction. The yarn being spun by the playwright rarely feels suspenseful.

Kudos, nonetheless, to this small company for doing the whole play. Scenes I’d previously found filler or “mere set up,” such as Polonius’ advice to his daughter Ophelia in Act One, felt very real this time. $25 for the whole classic, just a block from Times Square.

Young love, deadly as it can be, gets eclipsed by its elders’ problems in Hamlet.

When you’re young you read the Hamlet-Horatio or Hamlet-Ophelia scenes carefully, and regard the scenes between the prince and his elders as just that: reasoned limitations that the powers-that-be are placing on your hero’s freedom. Step-dad saying you can’t go to Lebanon for spring break.

As you age – I could say “mature,” but let’s be real – you start seeing Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and his step-dad Claudius, and even clownish old Polonius, as real people with real problems. (Jurgen Jones, who plays Claudius, is a friend of mine; he is at once regal and completely Jurgen.) They are the sun and moon of this show, and arguably of the play itself.

“Where do poems live?” is a harder question than “Why is the sky blue?” “It depends” may be the most accurate answer, but a live reading never did a poem any harm, and many are only alive when read aloud.

I know where screenplays live. They live on the screen – where the film is. The script itself is a demo version of what the film might be, and screenwriters have to be able to value a script as a script. Novelists published and unpublished have the pleasure of calling a work complete. Of course they’d love to see a stack of hard covers at a bookstore, but a PDF on an iPad is the same kind of experience as a student reading a used copy of Hard Times the night before her European History 102 exam, or at least the distinction is tiny compared with the ways we experience poetry.

The novel, I guess, created a planet full of people with rich psychological lives, the place where most literary thought lives being the interaction of page and eyeballs. My father would have turned 83 yesterday, and he rarely read books but could spend hours reading newspapers cover to cover with the same solitary exploration. I wonder at his thoughts on the civil war in Liberia, just like I wonder what my wife thinks of the row of George R.R. Martin novels on my bookshelf at home. He rarely talked about issues, but if asked could give you an informed opinion, inflected by his own experience growing up with “the war.”

There’s a famous story about Augustine of Hippo meeting Archbishop Ambrose of Milan. Neither one of them were saints yet – Augustine wasn’t even a Christian yet – and he was awed by the fact that Ambrose could read without moving his lips! To Augustine, who was no dummy, it was revolutionary that literature could live in the eyeball-page axis. To him and presumably most people, the written word was just shorthand for where literature really lived, spoken aloud.

The Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis is better known as the John Ashberry Bridge for the poem along its span.

It made Ambrose and his weird new faith alluring, to have a psyche and a conscience so private. This was the year 400, and already we were on that slippery slope to virtual reality helmets.

Poetry lives a double life, on the page and in the spoken word. Poems live on monuments, and some get domesticated for service at weddings and eulogies, but mostly they live being read aloud in small groups. Some friends of mine get together every once in a while just to have some drinks and read poems…at home, where we can control the audio. It’s slightly gauche in this setting to read your own work, at least before you’ve introduced some other published, contemporary poetry or dropped a few classics on the group.

Hearing poems made me write poems, and from this I got drafted to read with a group called the Verbal Supply Company, which hosts quarterly readings, usually at a bar called Halyards, not far from my house in Brooklyn. This Monday we’re moving to the Upper West Side for an evening. The group is celebrating its fourth year, so we’re all just doing extra short sets, and this time around many of the writers will be doing excerpts from memoirs and longer-form fiction. I’ll be doing some poems.

A previous Verbal Supply Company reading being called to order (photo by Brad Hamilton).

“Where do poems live?” is above all a practical question, to the person reading his or her poems. An article from 2014, by a poet named Rich Smith in Seattle, exhorting poets to stop using “the poet voice” keeps getting recycled online. It’s a reason people avoid readings: the dullness of readers, most of whom aren’t in fact performers, emphasizing the cadence and clarity of their work at the expense of any “Shazam!”

I try to be sensitive to that and give it some spoken-English life, but I can also relate to poets trying to honor their poems as literature, to insist on it having some life on the page the way a chapter of a novel does. We can’t help adding a dose of Saint Ambrose.

In its four years, the Verbal Supply Company has insisted that its readers come to a “rehearsal,” and guess what? The readers are more focussed, and the excerpts or poetry more thoughtfully read, a step closer to a theater showcase than an open mic night. When deciding, “Where does this piece live” at least a writer makes a conscious choice.

Past readings are archived online on the VSC website. So you can open a beer and listen at home. Tip your bartender. The third from the top, “Not Yet Fully Monetized” from last summer, is a good one to start with. (If you’re partial to morehastohappen, you can skip to my few poems at the very end, at 1 hour and 8 minutes.)

Years ago I spent an evening talking with a film critic who was born in Kenya, and he told me the only British film he ever liked was Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, a movie I frankly hated. He said it showed the British for the savages they are. I protested, “You mean you don’t like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach?” “Nope.”

I saw the best Richard II I suppose I’ll ever see on stage last week at the Lincoln Center Festival. The Druid Theater Company of Ireland put on a marathon seven-hour production (I saw the first half) of excerpts of the four Shakespeare history plays Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two, and Henry V. You knew you were in for a treat the moment it started, when Marty Rea entered as Richard, his face painted a ghostly white, surrounded by other characters in more conservative costumes just a bit reminiscent of Duran Duran.

Marty Rea as Richard II and Derbhle Crotty as Henry IV.

It was only the beginning of his commanding performance as Richard. Major parts, including Henry IV, were played by women, and the Irish accents every actor used to deliver the lines – Shakespeare writing about the founding of the English nation, as spoken by the Irish – were clear and passionate and yet tinged with political meaning. This is a company that loves Shakespeare so much it went straight for the plays that, according to director Garry Hynes, have the shadow of the colonization of Ireland over them at all times.

What a thrill writer Mark O’Rowe must have had cutting so many scenes, and making a lean narrative out of the plays that I, for one, usually find too windy to enjoy.

And talk about a reactive protagonist! Richard is besieged by problems that question his very legitimacy from the start, but never seizes control of the course of the plot. If a story, as we’re told again and again, is a character in pursuit of a goal, then this is a pathetic story, since the few attempts he makes to take any initiative are so ill-informed and going nowhere, no one would ever write this play today. And yet you felt his vulnerability the whole time, and the enormous weight of the sadness of his life.

The night I attended there was a talk back afterward, and Rea said that the closest character he could actually relate to as he tried breathing some life into Richard was Michael Jackson: chosen to be king when he was too young to be a fully formed person, and ending up an emotional deformity. An Irishman channeling the King of Pop to make Richard II believable. A night I’ll never forget.